The Other Side of Desire (22 page)

But unlike Bellmer’s images, the portraits of Bardot have a political purpose, a “usefulness” as Bellmer contemptuously put it, that accompanies the artistic vision. These are statements of enlightened outcry at the same time that they are invocations of darkness. They say:
Look
at this woman. She is an amputee, someone from whom you would avert your eyes, but she is beautiful, complex, as fully human as anyone you know.
Look. Stare. Take her in. Allow her in. Allow her to be.

And in some of the pictures, the message is yet more bold. There is no plea to be seen, recognized, permitted her humanity. There is presumption and self-advertisement:
I am splendid by any standard, and you will look, stare, want.
For all her welcoming of destruction, the photographs proclaim a liberation, a refusal to be reduced, an exultant strength.

Johnny Bardot, whose real name was Janet, bought heroin with the money Ron paid her. She had always used. But now dependency deepened, addiction took hold, and sometimes she couldn’t be photographed when they had arranged to work. She was nodding out. Always she had assumed any pose he described. She had never protested; body and being had been pliant. Now she deteriorated to the point that she couldn’t perform. Willingness became vacancy. The lens couldn’t find the life within her. And eventually she disappeared. But until then, she was much more than a model; she was an actress capable of embodying all the layers, all the contradictions he hoped to render. She poses, in one frame, with a pair of dark wooden crutches. She wears antiquated prosthetics that lace up along the thighs. One of the laces is loose, and part of the knee on the other leg is missing. Plainly the contraptions can’t work, but their leather and laces are beautiful, and she is determined to use them. She leans forward and tries to rise out of a chair, to lever herself onto the crutches with her thick, muscled arms. Her head tilts almost coquettishly, and her oakand-gold hair tumbles to that side, but there is nothing coquettish about her effort. She is fragile and stubborn, helpless and self-sufficient, broken and complete. She is lovely, and it is hard not to fall in love.

THE
jazz club was down a set of difficult stairs, impossible with a wheelchair. The maître d’ told him where to go, and he wheeled Laura down the block. At times, she didn’t wear her prosthetics, though she was proficient on them—they were awkward and exhausting. He wheeled her around the corner and through the front doors of an apartment building. They rode the building’s elevator down, navigated a basement corridor, entered the back door to the club’s kitchen. He wheeled her between the flaming stoves and mammoth refrigerators, between the chopping and sautéing, through the swinging doors and into the club. This, if you were in a wheelchair, was the only way.

After nineteen years, Ron’s marriage to Elizabeth was falling apart. “Not because we were a devotee and an amputee,” he said, “but because we were a man and a woman. Our marriage failed for the same screwed-up reasons that half of all marriages do.” He’d seen images of Laura on Carol Davis’s Web site, and Davis had relayed his request that she model. At the start, she was, for him, simply a replacement for Johnny Bardot. And he, for her, was someone to avoid dating. Intrigued as she was by what compelled devotees, and open as she was to the idea of their desire, she had decided she didn’t want to come any closer than conversation; she had told herself she didn’t want to be touched by anything more than a photographer’s lens. She bent her rule, she remembered, “because Ron was successful, a big-city person, intelligent, educated.” Hours before their evening at the jazz club, they’d finished an all-day shoot, a session with a modern dancer, an attempt to replicate the delicate lines of Degas despite the stolid thickness of stumps and the weight of prosthetics.

The bassist Ron Carter was playing that night. Carter’s girlfriend lived in Ron’s small building, but even without that, the musician might have recognized him—Ron was a regular at his gigs. Carter nodded and steered his band into “Blue Monk” as Ron wheeled Laura to a table. He knew it was Ron’s favorite. The bass climbed the song’s staircase of notes, skipping upward and then, distracted, stopping to dance on the steps before reaching the top.

At the shoot earlier that day, Ron had been “this neurotic photographer who was driving me insane,” Laura recalled. “Pacing back and forth in this loft he’d rented, pacing and yelling. He hated what the stylist was doing with my hair. He thought it was too severe. He’d never worked with her before, and he was freaking out. ‘What the fuck are you doing? What the fuck are you doing?’ Over and over. Chaos. The costumes wouldn’t sit right. He was chain-smoking and swearing. No one could find the electrical outlets. And we were waiting for the dancer. He’d hired someone from the Dance Theater of Harlem, but at the last minute he had to go with the troupe to Washington to perform for the president, and we were waiting for his replacement. It was mayhem. Ron was not a human being.”

He became one as Carter plucked his bass, performing subtle, lilting acrobatics. And afterward, with the months of phone calls and e-mails between New York and Pennsylvania, Ron’s being a devotee put her off less and less. “We started to talk all the time, and I was thinking, This is so wonderful. He was the first man I could totally relate to. I didn’t have to hide any of my dreams. I was thinking, This is the neatest thing in the world. I could tell he was everything I wanted, a friend and a companion and someone who accepted me totally for myself.” She cut herself off as she spoke to me. “This is going to make me cry.”

She sat, her voice breaking, in the living room of the house they’d bought together a year earlier, five years after they’d met. It was a few minutes’ drive from downtown in a Pennsylvania city, in a community of quiet lanes and cul-de-sacs, of well-pruned shrubs and sloping lawns. The one-story house had a stone façade and a small swimming pool where, in the summer, Laura did laps to exercise her arms and “limblets”—the word she preferred to “stumps.” Inside, all was sleek and modern. She sat on a square-backed couch, with her prosthetics off. Lately she had been learning to use a new pair. Their technology was more advanced; they would give her, eventually, a bit more agility. But the process would take half a year, and she swore that this was the last time she would put herself through it, no matter what improvements science offered. Her legs leaned, at the moment, against the wall in the bedroom she shared with Ron.

He rubbed her neck as her voice gave way. “When I met her, she was right on the cusp of things.”

“In his eyes, I was what he was looking for. But he was what
I
was looking for. I was coming out. I was changing.”

“It sounds kind of silly, but she was a bud about to bloom.”

“It’s true. It was like perfect timing. I wanted somebody responsible and worldly, somebody to talk to, somebody—not to take care of me but to be nurturing. And until Ron I never had a relationship like that.”

“She was out there alone.”

“I was striving, but I didn’t have any support. I didn’t have any self-esteem. Part of me knew there was something better inside me, but I didn’t have anyone to help me develop it.”

Now she had graduated from college and was halfway to a master’s in social work. She planned to counsel the disabled. “Everything I’ve ever wanted to do I’m doing now. I wanted to own a house like this. I wanted to model. I wanted a college education. And I wanted to be a psychologist, and now, in a way, I’m going to be.”

She worked, as part of her master’s program, at a state-funded mental health center that helped patients to find the right kind of care. The center was part of a movement in the field; it was known as a “consumer organization”—the staff were or had once been mental health patients themselves. They knew what it was to be as lost as Laura when she’d overdosed on Valium and spent ten days in a psychiatric ward.

Everyone else in the squat building of small offices had their whole bodies. Yet Laura seemed by far the most stable. The unkempt director talked incessantly about the great psychologists she’d studied with, about the great athletic achievements of her adult sons, about her own “giant balls” in standing up to practitioners who refused to listen to their patients. The center’s secretary, a chiseled ex-marine in a pressed polo shirt, said repeatedly, quietly, methodically, “I have a car now,” as though to convince himself of his recovery from the desolation that had hold of him. Another staffer wore her hair in a rat’s tail that dangled rakishly below her psychedelic skullcap. She had no top teeth and, openly lesbian, liked to flirt with Laura. “I love those photographs,” she said. “My wife and I are re-decorating, and I’m going to put one up, a sexy one; I’m going to blow it up big. Laura, when are you graduating? When are we celebrating? When are we going skinny-dipping? I want to touch those legs.”

In her office, Laura sat at a clutterless glass desk and took calls from the desperate. On the cork board behind her she’d tacked a poster of Freud declaring, “I’ve changed my mind, don’t tell me about your mother…recover!” But with her clients she had unlimited patience. She listened for an hour and a half to a paranoid schizophrenic recounting a feud with his neighbor over a woodpile. Later she visited a lockdown ward of psychotics and tried to persuade the staff to take guidance from the patients on their treatment. This was her mission: caregivers should see patients as equals. The delusional man raging about the woodpile might well know what was best for his own care. She brought all she’d been through to her work, all the times she’d been dismissed as a cripple by the people in charge of her rehabilitation, all the times she’d been unheard, invisible.

Near the poster of Freud was a photograph of Laura perched on a kitchen counter in a short red dress. “I like that picture,” she said. “It’s saucy.” Home was decorated with large, framed portraits: of her, of Johnny Bardot. In one, Laura sits in a silvery-pink satin dress, leaning forward with an elbow on one thigh and her chin on her fist. Her half-smile hints at self-satisfaction, defiance. She spreads her prosthetic knees and pushes the satin down between them, flaunting, concealing, taunting. But the expression on her face is more powerful than the flirtation with the fabric. Eros assumes a different form than it does in the portraits of Bardot. The sensibility has shifted with the muse. Laura radiates intelligence. Self-possession emanates more than the desire to be possessed.

Laura stands, in another photograph, wearing a two-piece gown, bodice and skirt, from centuries ago. The scarlet material is trimmed in gold brocade. From her waist the skirt billows outward, broad as a spinnaker, and grazes the floor in a huge circle. It fastens in front by a series of cobalt buttons, and she is about to start closing it, but for the moment it gapes open: a vertical window, eight or ten inches wide, runs from her waist to the floor. The gold brocade lines the opening like a ceremonial decoration, a veneration of what lies within. But nothing lies within. Inside the vast regal tent of the garment is darkness.

Because of the lighting and pose, Laura’s body seems to end at the belly, to have no stumps at all. The opening exposes a pure emptiness. It is unclear how she is standing, what keeps her upright. The cavern beneath the skirt is illumined just enough to suggest that she isn’t wearing her prosthetics. She stands on no legs, suspended, magical.

And that magic, along with her strong jawline turned in profile, endows her with omnipotence. The cavern is at once a universe and a womb. The vertical opening is a vaginal slit, and to slip through it, to slide the body inside the scarlet walls of the tent, to wait inside while she fastens the skirt and encloses you, swallows you, would be to live out the primal fantasy of entering the vagina not only with the penis but with everything from the skull to the toes: to be ensconced, to be consumed. The photograph’s viewer, not its subject, is at risk of disintegrating, coming apart, deliquescing in the lightless world he has longed for, turning to liquid in the womb. Laura, with her half-body, will remain more than intact, more than whole.

SHE
wore a ring with a white gold band and a diamond in a high setting. After six years together, they were engaged to be married. They were planning a honeymoon in Italy, including Venice, where, somehow, he would help her manage the city’s steeply arched bridges, its narrow and crooked stairs, its keeling pavement, its crowded alleys, its water taxis, and where, somehow, he would help her into a gondola that would take them gliding at night along the fire-lit canals.

Their lives were merged. She was his muse, who brought life to his dreams, and he had brought life to hers. They were merged “in the million ways that make up a relationship,” he said in their kitchen, as they prepared a Sunday breakfast of eggs and bagels for themselves and me.

“We have all the regular things that keep people together,” she added, wheeling herself around the island counter and setting the table.

“And like the cherry on the sundae is that she’s a double amputee, which brings me such happiness and pleasure and joy.” He spoke plainly, and she didn’t wince at his words. His attraction was an accepted fact between them, one they were accustomed to acknowledging, and though she didn’t smile at his praise and his gratitude, his way of saying that he felt extremely lucky to have found a woman he melded with so well and for whom he felt such desire, it wasn’t hard to imagine that she did sometimes smile at such phrases. Earlier that morning I had heard their voices across the hall in their bedroom. I had woken to their laughter.

She put out butter and jelly, and he served the eggs, and we sat down to eat. They talked about the way some in the amputee community called the attraction disgusting. “If it’s disgusting,” Laura asked, “what are they saying about themselves?”

She mentioned an article we’d all read in a magazine for the disabled. It spoke of the ways that doctors and psychologists and physical therapists often compounded the shame of amputees by pushing them into prosthetics not so much for the sake of independence as to spare everyone else the sight of their disfigurement. The writer recounted the stay of a quadrilateral amputee in a rehabilitation center, where she was all but forced to wear purely cosmetic legs and arms, and to cover herself in loose, long-sleeved clothing.